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Spaghetti westerns get their musical due

As The Good, the Bad and the Ugly grinds to its dusty climax, Ennio Morricone's score dramatizes the graveyard showdown between Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef with a section of soundtrack called “Trio,” a tension-building duel between fiddles, percussion and lone wolf electric guitar.

Manitoba-born violinist Steven Tsitsos brings Into the West: The Music of the Spaghetti Western to Toronto's Glenn Gould Studio on March 15 and 18. (HANDOUT PHOTO)

As The Good, the Bad and the Ugly grinds to its dusty climax, Ennio Morricone's score dramatizes the graveyard showdown between Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef with a section of soundtrack called “Trio,” a tension-building duel between fiddles, percussion and lone wolf electric guitar.

The scene from Sergio Leone's 1966 film made Eastwood's career. Its music might do the same for Steven Tsitsos, the Toronto violinist organizing two concerts with the enticing title “Into the West: The Music of the Spaghetti Western,” at the Glenn Gould Studio on Thursday, and again Sunday.

“Growing up I really had an affinity for these movies,” Tsitsos says on the phone. “It's music that really sticks with you.” (The concerts will also feature some revamped Jimi Hendrix and other more jazz-oriented pieces.)

Morricone's enormous output — scores for more than 500 movies and TV shows over 50 years — covers a remarkable range of styles including the Chopinesque soundtrack he wrote for Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso.

But Morricone's spaghetti western soundtracks have best defined his career as they have Leone's and maybe Eastwood's too. Parodied as kitsch and rarely given their iconic due, this archly dramatic stuff has been awaiting reinterpretation for years.

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Enter Tsitsos to dig deep into this buried treasure. Just 23 years old, the Thompson, Manitoba-born fiddler already knows a thing or two about selling himself and his ideas to a musical market hungry for high concept concerts and programs.

“I felt there was a lack of fresh interpretation for this kind of music,” he says. “Coming from a classical background, I am not a person to forget the roots of the music I am playing. I would never play Vivaldi with a rock background, for instance. I am very meticulous about paying attention to details.”

Bottom line: Tsitsos treats Morricone's western music with the respect it gets from movie buffs but rarely from musicians. Converting respect to sound had its difficulties, though.

“It was hard at first trying to figure out which kind of ensemble I wanted to interpret this music,” Tsitsos explains. “I wanted to avoid the formulaic way, using an orchestra or large ensemble. Yo-Yo Ma had done something with Morricone (for the Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone CD), but it didn't turn out well. For me, the best thing is to use a jazz quartet.”

Tsitsos turned to Terry Clarke, the Rolls Royce of Toronto jazz drummers, who brought on board local guitarist/composer David Occhipinti as arranger. (Clarke is appearing in the Glenn Gould Studio shows along with pianist Mike Janzen, guitarist Justin Abedin and bassist Andrew Downing.)

Even with such high-profile help, the intensive week spent last fall recording in CBC's Studio 211, with Tsitsos himself footing the bill of some $20,000, gave the project a risky edge. “There was tension in the way people wanted to interpret various passages,” he says. “As a leader, you come under personal fire for discounting someone's feelings.”

Everyone finally knew they were on the same page while listening to the rough edit of their version of Morricone's “Trio.”

“It's the moment in the (film's) music that has a lot of tension to it, a lot of strife,” says Tsitsos. “But when we started listening to what we'd recorded we looked around the room at each other. It was then we knew we were working on something special.”

Tsitsos is already establishing himself as someone special. The Morricone-inspired CD is his third studio album. He's also begun to carve out a live performance career that includes a 2010 concert with Clarke in Athens' mammoth Megaron complex, where he outdrew a string ensemble led by international star Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer.

Typically, Tsitsos knew how to sell himself. He spread the word by doing interviews on Greek national radio about his Athens appearance. He'd become fluent in Greek from talking with his parents, both born in Greece.

“With Morricone, I didn't want to rehash what's already been done,” he says. “It's really exaggerated and I wanted to play with that. Why not exaggerate it a bit further? But I wanted to play the music to suit my own style of playing. I really wanted to go to town on it.”

Into the West: The Music of the Spaghetti Western is at Glenn Gould Studio, 250 Front St. W., Thursday and Sunday. Peter Goddard is a freelance writer. Email: peter_g1@sympatico.ca

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